Maximise your marketing budget: It’s all in a number

In these challenging times, all businesses have to make rapid decisions to protect themselves from vulnerability and loss of assets. This usually involves significant cost cutting and one of the first areas to come under scrutiny is the marketing budget. Never has it been more important to understand what marketing brings in the most response. Having this information at your fingertips can make difficult marketing decisions a lot simpler. Forward planning as well as responding to the market with tactical messaging is key, but if there is limited knowledge of what areas generate good response, this can become risky and complicated.  

By applying a call to action to all your marketing material, every telephone response you get can be tracked and recorded.  Furthermore it is now possible to listen to all calls on your telephone numbers so you can improve your customer service levels and call handling. In this article we look at how you can use the humble telephone number to improve your marketing hit rate and overall operational effectiveness.

Marketing during an economic downturn can be challenging and businesses at this time generally act in one of two ways; spending more on marketing in the hope that this will generate an increase in sales or cut down on marketing spend and rely upon existing customer loyalty. Both reactions can be detrimental and the only way to counteract this is to adopt a much more focused attitude when it comes to marketing spend. During our seven years in the business of monitoring advertising spend; we have come across many businesses that spend vast amounts on advertising without using telephone response measurement to track the results. By monitoring telephone calls to show marketing effectiveness a business can cut out channels that are not bringing in the necessary numbers. Furthermore by listening to telephone enquiries lessons can be learned to enable staff to improve close rates and increase the ROI for the business. At the end of the day, companies need to focus on the accountability of their marketing spend.

One verses many telephone numbers

There is some debate amongst companies on whether they should stick to one telephone number or use different telephone numbers to track their effectiveness. Basically, the more numbers that are used, the more effective the monitoring that can be done and the more focus there can be on making the marketing spend more effective overall.

However, if a company is wedded to sticking with one number, they can still benefit from the management data the telephone number will throw off in terms of:-

a) How many calls are generated from the latest marketing campaign

b) How many calls have been missed as well as average call length

c) Where calls are coming from (geographic location)

d) If call recording is used, listen to sample calls which can be particularly useful if the call handling has been outsourced.

If your company is not already getting this basic information from the number used on their inbound enquiries, they should get this information straight away – it will throw up some interesting but scary information!

Be dynamic with telephone numbers

The ultimate aim is using different telephone numbers in both online and offline marketing collateral. Many companies are used to using different numbers on their offline marketing (for example, a different telephone number on print advertising or direct mail). We have seen companies save thousands by adopting this approach. Furthermore, companies who use different numbers have been the first to understand the importance of the internet within their overall sales and have reacted accordingly. They are changing their business models to react to the internet challenge faster than the competitors who are not monitoring their telephone numbers.

However, many companies ask us how they can measure the success of their internet advertising for generating inbound enquires. The way to do this is to build a website so that telephone numbers can be dynamic depending on the referring website. Thus, with clever programming a web site can show one telephone number from Google advertising and another from a banner advert. This gives a company the ability to measure their web sites in the round because for the first time they can measure their click throughs, customer journey to buy online and also see how many customers buy by phone after visiting the website rather than through an online order.

The five steps to telephone measurement

Action	Benefit
No measurement	None, you are flying in the dark
Stick to one number	Measure:- Call volumes and call lengths Where calls are coming from geographically Missed calls
Use multiple numbers	As above and also:- Advertising ROI and reduce advertising spend by seeing what works Test different creative to see if it generates better response
Use dynamic numbers on the web	Show what referring web sites generate calls and focus spend accordingly
Call recording on telephone numbers	No expensive equipment required, all done at network level. Allows companies to:- Improve call handling Implement telephone training effectively Monitor behaviour of call centres (especially when outsourced)

Now listen and learn

The use of different telephone numbers for each advertising or marketing medium is only the first stage in being able to successfully measure response rates.  The latest improvement that has been made to telephone numbers is the ability to sit at a PC and listen to the actual calls an advert generates. This is all done without expensive boxes or equipment and can be linked to your telephone number and all the calls are delivered to a website where a wav file can be listened to through the pc. For the first time marketing spend can be linked directly to the sale which gets right to the heart of demonstrating what works and most importantly the cost per lead from each marketing channel.

Recording incoming calls can give a business an instant insight into successful calls and those calls that need attention.  If there is a distinct difference in the number of leads coming in with the number of sales being made, then being able to listen to the calls will give a clearer idea of what is working and what isn’t.  When outsourcing response handling, having the ability to record calls can be an excellent way of monitoring performance before its too late and a campaign is over.  Once a campaign has been started calls can be recorded as soon as they start coming in which offers the opportunity to assess the campaign response at any point rather than waiting until the campaign has run its course and the results have been gathered.

Telephone handling is a vital element in the marketing and eventual sale of products, the customer, especially in today’s market, has the choice of hundreds of mail order companies and online retail outlets, so if they choose yours, the call needs to be right.  Listening to calls on an individual basis can be a great way to inspire a team responsible for taking enquiries.  Hearing how not to do it as well as how to do it well can make a big difference as putting handlers in the picture is often the difference between success and failure.  Also, an outsourced call centre is not your business; the team may be working on other projects for companies that have a very different approach to you.  Monitoring the calls will ensure that every enquiry is being dealt with according to your guidelines. 

Love your numbers

Marketing professionals spend thousands of pounds on getting their marketing strategy correct and the humble telephone number is often ignored. However, by understanding the importance of the telephone number and the information it can provide will transform a companies approach to their marketing spend. Instantly you can see what works and listen to it as well. So learn to love your telephone number(s) and it will reward you with vital management information so that you can improve your marketing decision making and protect your business going forward.

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